The Wake

A little nervous.
A little scared.
Maybe, yeah, a little.

I’m dressed in all black. The guy sitting in the next seat is looking at me. I glare at him. He looks away. Dark at eight, in by nine. I get off the bus, hyperalert, slightly sweaty. I’ve done this before but somehow it doesn’t feel like it right now. I start to walk.

When my destination materializes out of the night, I experience my first rush of adrenaline. The thing about abandoned factories is that they’re so dangerous. In their prime, they were able to run efficiently because of the regulations and safety codes that kept the machinery functioning and the laborers alive. Now, in the post-dusk hour, I sense that I am free of those rules, and because of that, I am in an entirely different position than those who worked here when this grain elevator was actually employing people. They worked with the machines and the building; I work against them.

It’s the approach that intimidates me the most, I think. In the semi-urban semi-darkness the industrial complex looms above me, a foreboding, dark, hollow thing, a vortex of darkness. Now for the inspection: find an entry point. The second most intimidating part could acutally be the time between approach and location of an entrance. Where is it I know they’ve all been in here before this door is welded shut how could anyone fit in there shit did I come all the way out here for nothing is someone going to come around the corner… There. Locate a broken-out basement window and approach cautiously. So far, so good. Peering in, I realize that there’s water at least a foot deep covering the floor. The basement ceiling/floor of the first floor is cut away in an area surrounding the window, forming a two-sided ledge. Someone, some earlier other, left a can of Montana Gold spray paint and a precariously tilted ladder propped up against the edge of the hole. Slide through the window and swing, my feet on the unstable ladder as I grab onto the edge and hoist myself up to the first floor, away from the basement and the murky water and the host of things that must inhabit both.

Suddenly, I realize that I’m very in.

There’s something chilling about standing in a pitch-black room and having no concept of what the demensions of that room are. Feels like being swallowed whole. It’s like in that book he gave me that one time, when we still did this together. House of Leaves. I’m in the House of Leaves, for five seconds, and then I turn my flashlight on and let out my breath. Wall, wall, wall, wall, ceiling. Floor. Grain. The floor is covered in grain. I swish around in it, searching the room for a way further in: a door, a window, a stairwell. I find none of these, only pulleys and chains and a boarded-up entrance that I assume goes back outside. I’m about to feel frustrated when I see it: a ladder, rungs bolted to the wall, going up an empty elevator shaft. Swing on, test my weight, begin ascending into the darkness.

Still going up. Hand, hand, foot, foot. My palms are sweaty. I have no idea how far I’ve climbed. I look down. Darkness. I look up. Slightly-more-gray darkness. I continue. It feels like hours but it’s probably just minutes. I stop, resting my forehead against a rung, feeling the ache in my muscles. I wonder how high I’d have to climb before my arms would wear out and I would fall. Grimly, I start going up again. Four rungs later, my head pokes into a large room, eerily lit by the floodlights of the warehouse next door. I clamber up onto the floor, sit with my legs dangling into the dark shaft, peering down. Feel the cold air rushing up out of the blackness; I shudder. Standing, I situate myself in this new space.

It’s a big room; looking up, I can’t make out the ceiling. Machinery, hulking and decrepit, silhouetted
against the windows facing the warehouse. A door connects to a walkway for machinery maintenance, and the sky shows through where the roof has mysteriously disappeared for twenty or so feet. Chutes and ladders crisscross the room for several stories, empty and rusting. I maneuver across the room, picking around the treacherous holes and the broken glass and the sharp metal edges. Grain is everywhere. Climb up a ladder and perch on a catwalk that’s barely holding it together. Looking out this window, I have a breathtaking view of the skyline of a city that is alive, a city that was birthed and nursed and raised by the industry that this building housed, now long dead, now memorialized by walking tour signs and a museum on the fancy new riverfront. Progress. I pick the grain out of the tread of my shoes and wonder if Minneapolis has forsaken her mother. Do these ruins evidence abandonment, or represent timeless, inevitable change? Where has the memory of this huge part of our history gone? Is it that we’ve moved on, or that we’ve merely forgotten? I sit in the ribcage of a skeleton of labor, feeling small. There are ten remaining abandoned grain elevators in the metro area. This place is a graveyard.

Climbing down the elevator shaft is like descending into the depths of hell. Cold air grabs at me from below. I swear I can feel the darkness moving around me. Foot, foot, hand, hand. I contemplate never reaching the bottom, doomed to climb down forever in the pitch black. I breathe and keep going. My foot hits the bottom. Now that I’m really looking at the floor, I realize that the bottom is actually a board covering the hole of the shaft, and that the ladder keeps going down. Hell. I do not know this yet, but almost exactly three years earlier, a man was severely injured by falling 50 feet down this same elevator shaft. He was arrested. I won’t be. Turn and walk towards my window. No sense in sticking around. In a movement surprisingly agile, I am out, a chorus of frogs greeting me from the creek that surrounds this place on three sides like an ancient moat. As I start back towards the overpass I look back, identifying the rooms I was in, studying, remembering. I won’t forget.